excitedWedding planning stuff is also going well. We went to a bridal fair last weekend which was interesting, and last Wednesday morning we booked the wedding venue, and the date is set. July 15th... yes, this year. It's surprising how many people do a double take when you tell them you're planning to have a wedding in under two months, but there doesn't seem to have been any hitches yet. It's off-peak season for weddings, and so everything we've wanted so far has been available. And no, there's no dirty secret as to why it's so soon, it's just the time that is most convenient and suits the most people.
Wednesday night I competed, together with
lovely2 and MW-WALJ, in a programming competition called Live-Coda run by someone at the CS department. It was in a trendy bar in the city with cool electronic music (at least until about 10pm when some crap rapper type people started up), and it was an extreme programming (up to 4 people working on one code file) competition where we had to solve a problem as fast as possible, under 10 minutes. We rocked so hard... :DThe code teams had to write on the evening had to take an image that had colour inversion, channels swapped or channels flipped vertically and correct the image. The choice of language was open, and since our team was made up of people who have been correcting student's C code for years, we chose to go with C. The average team seemed to struggle to get code to even compile in under 10 minutes. We had the problem solved in 3:26, 2 minutes faster than the next fastest team. Unfortunately, there's some contention about our solution, because the image we had been provided with had been pre-processed before the competition, and so the computer didn't register our 3:26 solution as solved. It took us another 3 minutes to get a solution that the computer was happy with. We're still waiting on the judge's decision for which time to use.
I've always been hesitant to enter programming competitions because I was worried that I'd find that my confidence in my abilities was all delusional. It was nice to go in and come away with the reassurance that we are all actually pretty good at what we do. :) go us.
There are other things that are super exciting too... I should make more posts, but generally everything in my life seems to be going better than I ever could have wished for. Well, except I've come down with something and lost my voice. I think it's mostly stress related to do with assignments being due and wedding planning and the late night shouting at people in a bar didn't help it. Hopefully it clears up soon.
Oh, the other exciting thing that I have to comment on, it seems quite likely that by the end of next semester I should have a job with the engineering faculty where they will pay me to do exactly what I want to do. My dream job. That's pretty cool too, but I'll wait until things are more certain.
